


Diary of Death

by rhombus



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Diary/Journal, F/M, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-09
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-06-07 07:03:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6792331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhombus/pseuds/rhombus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diary of Death

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Captain America: Civil War. A lot of them.

He writes it on the first page of the notebook.

 _My name is Bucky_.

He scratches it out immediately.

The pristine white page is disturbed by those ugly black marks. That's what he does. He leaves ugly black marks where they shouldn't be.

He writes his name again.

_Bucky Barnes_

Adds a subtitle with a flourish of his wrist.

_A Diary of Death_

***

He remembers everything. That's the ironic part. After all that jimmying open his brain, all those electrodes and wipes and beatings, he thought maybe it would spare him this.

He remembers  _everything_. Every order, every mission, every face. How is that fair?

He writes them down. Starts chronologically. Entry number one: The doctor who sawed off his arm. Method: Strangulation. Outcome: Broken neck. Sweat beads on his forehead but he keeps writing. _Entry number two_.

Gets to 1963 before the first urge comes to put a bullet in his own brain. Today.

He slashes a big black X through the page. That's not right. That's not the beginning. He wasn't born in 1945.

Thumbs to the next blank page.

 _My name is Bucky. I was born in Brooklyn. I had a friend named Steve. He was_ ~~ _a little shithead_~~ ~~_a nightmare to live with_~~ _a good person. I think I was too._ _Except that time we took those plums off the corner fruit cart and made a break for it._

It's the smile that stops him. He hasn't smiled in decades. It actually hurts a little.

He has to stop. This is giving him a headache. All this remembering. All these thoughts. It's better not to think. It's better not to make up his own history. That was someone else's job for so long, he's forgotten how to do it, he's out of practice, out of shape, out of good grace.

He puts the notebook in his backpack, steals some coins for bus fare, rolls up his sleeping bag and finds a new city.

***

It's in Warsaw that he gets to 1991. _No witnesses_.

Method: Blunt force.

Fuck.

_Sergeant Barnes?_

Outcome—

Fucking hell. He barely makes it to the toilet in the abandoned apartment before throwing up.

***

There's the woman in Odessa. 2009. The redhead. Steve's redhead.

Bucharest is loud outside the covered windows; horns blare and men yell.

No. Not Steve's redhead. She was the soldier's first. (The soldier. Like it wasn't him. Like it wasn't all him. You're fooling yourself, Barnes. You worthless piece of shit.) He writes that down too. It makes him feel slightly better.

 _Natalia_.

That was her name. She was no one's.

Method: Shot through the stomach. Outcome: Survived.

That wasn't allowed. That was outside the mission parameters. He'd taken out his target but left a witness.

He remembers walking up to her, because he remembers everything. Remembers wanting to step on her throat, crush her neck, and walk away. Remembers the way she said, "You don't recognize me," like it was a foregone conclusion, but like it hurt, too, like it pulverized to powder a heart that was already all dried up. It hadn't made sense then. It makes sense now.

Natalia.

He'd left her alive. Walked away knowing the job was unfinished. Knowing it was necessary for her to die. Knowing she'd make it, she always made it, she was always so hard to pin down.

He thinks… he may have loved her once?

That's a problem. Memories are easy, they assault him from all sides. Feelings are hard. He has to pry them out of crevices, impenetrable as the grooves in his grotesque facsimile of an arm.

Redheads were always a weakness. He remembers that too. Redheads in red dresses in dark bars in cold towns.

He's not sure he wants to have feelings again. He's one hundred percent done with feelings.

His finger absently rubs up against the paperclip, the top edge of the photograph, the page carefully torn out of a museum brochure, but he won't flip to it.

He's done. He can't.

***

2014\. Target: Captain America. Method: Stabbed. Shot. Shot. Shot. Drowned.

Outcome: Saved.

***

The next day he spends three hours looking at the photograph of Steve and doesn't write any entries at all.

Instead he buys plums. Takes a deep breath, almost grins, when he pays for them—one black mark scrubbed off of his soul.

But it's the last one before everything falls apart around him again and this time he's tearing Steve down with him through that endless ravine. Because Steve's got his notebook in his hands and Steve's being arrested in the streets and Steve's pummeling his friends and Steve's standing _right there_ when the video plays and Steve's seeing it all, all of it, every second of it and Steve's not pounding him into the dirt where he belongs and Steve's gonna get _killed_ by Stark and Steve's telling him not to go under again because they'll figure something else out, they always do Buck, and Steve's _wrong wrong wrong_ and Steve's saying goodbye to him and Steve's the last thing he sees when the ice takes him.

But it's all right.

It's numbness. It's forgetting. It's home.


End file.
